


Number Nine

by ApollonDeuxMille



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: M/M, TW: Suicide Mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-11
Updated: 2016-06-11
Packaged: 2018-07-14 10:08:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7166849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApollonDeuxMille/pseuds/ApollonDeuxMille
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His heart bucks and he’s wide awake, scrabbling under the lampshade to flick the light on. These kinds of phonecalls are rare, Oswald is generally courteous enough to let Jim sleep through the night. He swings his bare legs over the edge of his bed and grabs his phone, but leaves it on loudspeaker. Oswald is silent.</p><p>‘Oswald, are you still there?’</p>
            </blockquote>





	Number Nine

**Author's Note:**

> A short response to a prompt to "‘When I said whatever helps you sleep at night, I didn't mean this’" This is also posted on my Tumblr blog @delicatelyserved.

It’s 2:32am.

‘Hello?’ Jim clears the gravelly sleep from his throat. There’s no reply from the unknown caller, but he can hear rustling and breathing. ‘Who is this?’

No one speaks. Jim’s tired arm is complaining as he holds the phone to his ear, so he sets it to loudspeaker and rests it on the pillow next to his face. He can’t even open his gritty eyes.

_‘Jim…’_

The voice makes him twitch as if heavy, cold raindrops are landing on his bare ribcage.

‘Oswald?’

His heart bucks and he’s wide awake, scrabbling under the lampshade to flick the light on. These kinds of phonecalls are rare, Oswald is generally courteous enough to let Jim sleep through the night. He swings his bare legs over the edge of his bed and grabs his phone, but leaves it on loudspeaker. Oswald is silent.

‘Oswald, are you still there?’

Jim can hear him breathing down the line, almost panting. A dull, rhythmic thudding picks up behind the laboured breaths and moans.

‘What’s that noise, Oswald?’

It doesn’t stop. The frigid hand of panic slides down Jim’s backbone and makes his breath hitch. The light from his little bedside lamp doesn’t penetrate the corners of his room. Jim quivers, frightened of faces and fingers crawling around the edges to press down on his chest. This, he scolds himself, is not another night terror.

‘Oswald, where are you?’

_‘I’m tired…’_

‘You have to tell me where you are.’ The phone is on his cabinet as pulls on whatever clothes his hands find first. ‘Where are you staying tonight?’

The thudding stops for a moment. Oswald gasps and whimpers like someone shutting their finger in a door, then the forbidding rhythm begins again.

‘You _have_ to tell me where you are.’

Oswald is crying, but Jim hears him utter faintly, _‘Number Nine…’_

* * *

There are nine accommodations throughout Gotham owned by Oswald, specifically for rotational use as safe houses. Some are full, multi-room apartments similar to Jim’s home, others are claustrophobic studios with little more than a vertical wall bed, a wet room and a kitchenette in a corner. Oswald allows a select few of his people to have knowledge of the locations of the first six. The last three are black sites; off-grid mysteries for use in the most dire of circumstances. Jim knows their exact whereabouts and has the codes and print clearance for all of them, the only other person asides from Oswald himself.

Number Nine is a maisonette a mere six blocks away, the nearest to Jim’s apartment, and has been used just once before. Not wanting to waste precious time attacking his windscreen with an ice-scraper, Jim gallops clumsily through the snow with his phone in his hand. Jogpants, a backwards mustard sweater and black Timberlands are his only battle gear tonight. Drawing the bitter air into his lungs is agony. He might be crying, noticing his face is wet. Perhaps it’s just the shock of the cold.

* * *

The vetted concierges of the building are extremely well-paid by a secretive benefactor to never reveal the identities of two men on a laminated document, made to look like a page in the ring-binder full of mugshots of ‘undesirables’. Amongst the pages of people banned from entering the building for various reasons, there is page with just two faces. A pale, sickly bird-like man with an outdated swoop of dyed black hair and another, more wholesome looking man with golden hair. He has doleful eyes and sad lines around his mouth.

Jim knows he has to let the concierge see his face, his free pass, so he points it at the desk as he flies through the revolving doors, sodden boots squealing on the synthetic marble floor. A brief glance, that’s it. Jim doesn’t falter, jabbing the upwards triangle button by the elevator. He’s shaking. He’s cold and he’s terrified. The door pings and he is lifted uncomfortably fast to the twenty third floor.

When he reaches the door of Number Nine, it takes him three attempts to enter the code on the push button lockpad with his trembling fingers. When the code is accepted another pad below the spy-hole blinks with a little green light. Jim splays his left hand on it and waits for it to scan him. The heavy lock clunks and the door slides open.

The place is beautiful, a feat of minimalist yet inviting design, an abundance of clean lines, glistening granite and bespoke furniture. The luxurious decadence is insurmountable, and Jim would half expect to throw open the balcony windows to see a breathtaking Finnish tundra with wild reindeer grazing on sedges and moss.  

Jim takes a moment to look up through eyefuls of tears at the modern chandelier as he walks beneath it, a gossamer twist of glass and copper studded with tiny lights. He adores it, but as he looks back down at the gleaming white floors, the embrace of loveliness dissipates. The ugly, pendulous memories of the gaudy wooden throne Oswald once proudly sat on, almost five years ago, swings around inside his skull. The oppressive Gothic flair and sense of insidious grime seeping into his skin feels real. He remembers the blood on those dirty wooden floors and he remembers the blood on the pale surfaces here.

‘Oswald?’

The only reply is the gentle thudding he heard on the phone line.

‘Where are you, Oswald?

Feeling numbingly distraught, Jim stalks through the rooms, looking for the noise. Each step brings him closer to the echoes of lapping, bloody bath water that stain his mind. He has a throat full of heart, recalling the way the copper tub had almost disguised the red blooms, the way Oswald’s glistening, snowy flesh was beaded and laced with watery residues of blood. No longer submerged, he had arranged his head on the bath pillow, calmly waiting to be drained.

He’s retreated to the bathroom again this time, Jim realises, but there’s no tinkling piano music slipping out of the sound system and no careful composition of tea lights along the bath shelf. Instead, the spotlights in the ceiling are all on, a bathtub full of sparkling, coloured water sits forgotten and Oswald is hunched next to the toilet, a tiny heap of naked flesh, drunkenly thumping the side of his head against the cistern.

‘Oswald!’ Jim shakes his shoulder. ‘Oswald, what are you doing?’

‘I… just wanted… to sleep…’

Oswald’s gaze is dopey and he slurs in tremendous reminiscence of his days as a alcoholic. His wayward eyes struggle to focus on Jim, though he tries quite earnestly, endearingly, until his clammy head flops forward onto the toilet seat.

‘Oswald, have you taken something?’

An arm flaps in the direction of the basin, where Jim finds a broken glass, the spilled remnants of red wine and an empty blister pack on top of a little box.

‘Jim…’

‘I’m coming, little one,’ he murmurs as he reads the ingredients on the back of the box. _Humulus lupulus, valeriana officinalis, passiflora incarnata._ Herbal sleep aids, the same ones Jim used to rely on. He could scream, all the horror he’s felt swelling inside is ready to detonate. He counts the empty blisters, only six. He’s beside Oswald again in a few long slippery strides. There’s vomit in the toilet and he can see some of the tablets.

‘Oswald,’ he whispers. One, bleary sea-green eye finds him. ‘You really, _really_ scared me for a moment.’

* * *

Neither Jim nor Oswald have ever slept a night at Number Nine, given the circumstances of the last time it was used. The sensational mezzanine level has a sunken, king-size bed with pale linen and Oswald’s preference for opulent stacks of pillows and cushions. The only light comes from the delicate chandelier, softly twinkling in the rising warmth of the radiators.

After inducing the expulsion of everything left in Oswald’s stomach, mostly wine and a small cluster of tablets, Jim had drawn a new bath and filled it with anything that smelled of lavender. They bathed in the swirling galaxy until their hands wrinkled. Now dried and cocooned in the depths of the bed, they braid their limbs around each other like otters. Oswald wanted a full  pyjama suit, anything to help him sleep, whilst Jim has to make do with his boxers.

A dismal few weeks has trudged by since they last had the opportunity to sleep next to each other. Their breathing falls into an analogous stride as they begin to melt away into slumber.

Before they do, Jim tilts his face and inhales the scent Oswald’s fine hair.

‘Was that meant to be like last time?’

Oswald tenses.

‘No.’

Jim kisses Oswald’s forehead as if he can smooth the scowl out of it, making him sigh.

‘I just can’t sleep sometimes.’

‘Me neither.’

He watches the chandelier, tenderly rubbing his thumb over the slight lump on the side of Oswald’s head. This is a new thing. It used to be that Oswald would chew his fingers or rip small chunks of hair out of the back of his head, now it was this. Jim hoped it wouldn’t be a particularly long lasting habit. He tries to squeeze the hateful thoughts of past pains out of his head, the evening so nightmarish that it’s even dredged up old images of Oswald at the pier, or sitting bloodied and dishevelled at a restaurant table. Begging desperately in a black and white striped overall.

Exhausted, Jim feels the whole night begin to slide out of the corners of his eyes. He has to clamp his free hand over his mouth but he can’t stop the tremors in his body, making Oswald’s head jiggle on his chest. He composes himself as quietly as he can.

‘Oswald…?’

But he’s finally asleep, his cool breath steady and reassuring. Jim, relieved, face aching, covers his mouth again. In peace he expels his woes, with his arm scooped around Oswald, to remind him of what’s always been real.


End file.
